DataStax, the company that powers the big data apps that transform business, today announced the early adopter program (EAP) launch of DataStax Enterprise (DSE) 3.0. The new version provides core security capabilities to the entire Cassandra community, as well as the advanced data protection that businesses expect in an enterprise-grade database. DSE 3.0 supplies the type of security framework that allows modern enterprises to confidently adopt NoSQL databases as they safely scale their big data infrastructure.

"DSE 3.0 combines the security and easy manageability that modern businesses require for their enterprise-class applications," said Robin Schumacher, vice president of products, DataStax. "Our new version features both internal and external authentication, easy object permission management, transparent data encryption, data auditing, secured client to node transport, and an improved visual administration environment that enables businesses to easily and securely deploy and manage large database clusters both on premise and in the cloud."

Security For The Community

DataStax Enterprise Edition is a complete big data platform, built on Apache Cassandra, that is architected to manage real-time, analytic, and enterprise search data all in the same database cluster. With the release of DSE 3.0, DataStax is providing security features both to the open source community and to the enterprise. For the Cassandra NoSQL community, DataStax is making the following security enhancements freely available to everyone who uses Apache Cassandra:* Authentication based on internally controlled login accounts and passwords* Object permission management based on the familiar relational database GRANT/REVOKE paradigm* Client-to-node encryption, which protects data in flight from client machines to a database cluster

Security For The Enterprise

In addition to the general security features being made available to the entire Cassandra NoSQL community, DSE 3.0 supplies the following features to enterprises that require advanced security when handling mission-critical data:* External authentication via LDAP and Kerberos, which are the most trusted external security packages in use today, especially by governments and financial institutions. External authentication allows DSE to provide single sign on capability to all Cassandra, Hadoop, and Solr nodes in a DSE cluster* Transparent data encryption protects data at rest from theft, and from unauthorized read access at the file system level* Data auditing enables administrators to create granular audit trails of some or all activity in a database cluster

"The addition of new security features in both Apache Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise is indicative of the ongoing maturation of NoSQL databases in-keeping with an increasing interest from Web companies and traditional enterprises alike," said Matt Aslett, research manager, data management and analytics, 451 Research. "The full range of security features delivered in DSE 3.0 is not likely to be necessary for every project, but having authentication, encryption and auditing on the list of features will likely help open doors to adoption by mainstream users."

Streamlined, Big Data Management

DSE 3.0 also simplifies management of big data systems and supplies greater ease of use for day-to-day administration tasks. OpsCenter Enterprise 3.0, a visual browser-based solution for managing big data platforms, provides the following new features:* Visual Enterprise provisioning simplifies and streamlines the creation and management of new clusters both on-premise and in the cloud. Users can create, configure and monitor new clusters from scratch within minutes in point-and-click fashion* Visual restore management provides visual ways to restore a database cluster from backups. Both full restore as well as object-level restore from full backups, are supported, which enables admins to easily carry out restore operations with confidence* Visual object management offers increased support for visually creating and managing all database objects in a DSE cluster* Automated software update notifications keeps administrators aware of new software versions that are available from the Apache community as well as DataStax

"DSE 3.0 lets us easily manage our big data needs and gain important insights that help us serve our customers, and ultimately patients, more effectively," said Terrell Deppe, chief technology officer, HealthCare Anytime. "We are committed to protecting patient health information, and DSE's new security features greatly enhance the strength of our solutions. These features have arrived at just the right time for us because the volume and velocity of our data is bigger than ever."

About DataStax

DataStax powers the big data apps that transform business for more than 200 customers, including startups and 20 of the Fortune 100. DataStax delivers a massively scalable, flexible and continuously available big data platform built on Apache Cassandra™. DataStax integrates enterprise-ready Cassandra, Apache Hadoop™ for analytics and Apache Solr™ for search across multi-datacenters and in the cloud.